“Dear Lord, please don’t let me f--- up.”
“The Right Stuff,” Tom Wolfe’s amazing book about the early days of the U.S. space program, is about the pilots who were brave enough to have themselves launched into space atop experimental rockets, every piece of which, in Shepard’s words, was built by the lowest bidder.
Outside the fame of the Mercury 7, American test pilots had been flying experimental aircraft for years, often with disastrous results. Test pilots went to a lot of funerals and, Wolfe wrote, a common, unspoken, thought ran through their minds.
That pilot, my colleague, my good friend, made a mistake.